Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Politics

Americans Say ‘Okay, Whatever’ to Permitting Reform

The latest Heatmap poll finds that on permitting, at least, most people are just fine with compromise.

Joe Manchin and John Barrasso.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Most Americans support the idea of a bipartisan law that would make it easier to build new clean energy projects while benefiting some oil and gas development, according to a Heatmap News poll conducted earlier this month.

Some 52% of Americans said they backed the general idea of the legislation, the poll found. About a quarter of Americans opposed it, and roughly another quarter said they weren’t sure.

That’s good news for one of the last remaining pieces of environmental policy that Congress could pass under this presidency: a bipartisan proposal from Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that would speed up the process of building climate-friendly infrastructure in exchange for concessions to the oil and gas industry.

The legislation is meant to bind together Democratic and Republican goals for the country’s energy development. Democrats in Congress and the White House are worried that permitting delays and excessive red tape could now slow down America’s shift away from fossil fuels. This year, for instance, the United States will add less new wind capacity than it has in any year since 2020. Experts say that’s due in large part to the lack of new power lines to parts of the country where wind is abundant. Even many progressives, who have historically championed stricter permitting and environmental review laws, now favor altering them in the abstract to speed the zero-carbon buildout — although prominent groups have opposed this particular deal.

Republicans, meanwhile, have accused the Biden administration of dragging its feet on making federally owned lands available for oil and gas development. The Biden administration leased 95% fewer acres in 2023 than the Trump administration did in 2019, according to E&E News.

Under President Biden, the Interior Department has acknowledged that oil and gas drilling on public lands worsens climate change, but said that information alone does not allow it to block new leases. From 2005 to 2019, roughly one quarter of all fossil fuel extraction in the United States happened on federal land.

Beyond those facts, however, having a national conversation about permitting reform is tricky because so many proposals are so deep in the weeds that their importance often isn’t immediately obvious. How many voters are ready to debate whether the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should be able to fast-track certain new power lines? Or why there should be a statute of limitations for some National Environmental Policy Act lawsuits? (If you’re curious, I wrote a cheat sheet on some of the biggest permitting reform proposals last year.)

Indeed, many of the people Heatmap polled told us they didn’t know enough to decide whether they were for or against the bill — but those who did feel confident answering largely said they were in favor of it. Across cities and suburbs, political parties and age groups, permitting reform is about 15 to 25 points above water. Republicans are somewhat more amenable to the compromise than Democrats: 58% of GOP voters support the proposal, while only 47% of Democrats do. Independents are most skeptical at 44%, though the idea of the deal still has more independent supporters than opponents.

The idea of a deal commands majority support in every region of the country. It’s also supported by most Americans who say they live in rural areas, small towns, suburbs, and small cities. (Among Americans who live in large cities, the measure commands 48% support.) Even Americans who say they would oppose some forms of energy development in their area — such as a hydrogen project or battery storage plant — back the proposal.

This all suggests that the permitting reform deal could remain largely depoliticized as Congress continues to debate it through the fall — if you were to summarize respondents’ reactions to the survey, it might look like, “Sure, whatever, sounds good.” The public’s apparent openness to a deal also comes as its concern for urgent action on climate change has somewhat cooled since 2020.

Over the past few years, too, polls have detected a substantive drop in Republican support for clean energy development. While 54% of conservative Republicans backed clean energy in 2018 according to a Yale poll, that figure has since fallen to 24%. Building more clean energy does not even command a majority of liberal and moderate Republican support anymore, Anthony Leiserowitz, a Yale professor of climate change communication, told me.

A separate poll — from the Pew Research Center — found that Republican support for building more wind and solar farms has fallen by 20 percentage points since President Joe Biden took office, although it also showed that both energy sources commanded majority support.

“Clean energy used to be one of those things that pretty much everyone supported more or less,” Leiserowitz said. “That is important. That is the backdrop to the deeper currents behind the increasing opposition to wind farms and solar farms across the country.”

“Clean energy,” he added, “has become much more politicized than it was in the past.”

The Heatmap poll of 5,202 American adults was conducted by Embold Research via online responses from August 3 to 16, 2024. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.

Green

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Politics

Heatmap Poll: Do Americans Blame Trump or Biden for Rising Electricity Prices?

Republicans are more likely to accuse Democrats, and vice versa, but there are also some surprising areas of agreement.

An angry billpayer.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Electricity is getting more expensive. In the past 12 months, electricity prices have increased more than twice as fast as overall inflation — and the most recent government inflation data, released last week, shows prices are continuing to rise.

The Trump administration knows that power bills are a political liability. In a recent interview with Politico, Energy Secretary Chris Wright affirmed that power prices were rising, but blamed the surge on “momentum” from Biden and Obama-era policies. “That momentum is pushing prices up right now,” he said. But the Trump administration, he continued, is “going to get blamed because we’re in office.”

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Climate

Trump Resumes Wind War

On EPA’s CO2 math, the British atom, and Ram’s reversal

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A prolonged heatwave in Mississippi is breaking nearly century-old temperature records and driving the thermometer up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit again this week • A surge of tropical moisture is steaming the West Coast, with temperatures up to 10 degrees higher than average • Heavy rainfall has set off landslide warnings in every major country in West Africa.


THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump asks court to revoke permits for Maryland offshore wind project

The Trump administration asked a federal judge on Friday to withdraw the Department of the Interior’s approval of a wind farm off the coast of Maryland, Reuters reported. Known as the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, the $6 billion array of as many as 114 turbines in a stretch of federal ocean was set to begin construction next year. Developer US Wind — a joint venture between the investment firm Apollo Global Management and a subsidiary of the Italian industrial giant Toto Holding SpA — had already faced pushback from Republicans. The town of Ocean City sued to overturn the project’s permits at the federal and state levels. When the Interior Department first announced it was reconsidering the permits in August, Mary Beth Carozza, the Republican state senator representing the area, welcomed the move but warned in a statement the news site Maryland Matters cited that opponents’ campaign against the project, known as Stop Offshore Wind, “won’t stop fighting until the Maryland offshore wind project is completely dead.”

Keep reading...Show less
Green
Energy

The EPA’s Backdoor Move to Hobble the Carbon Capture Industry

Why killing a government climate database could essentially gut a tax credit

Lee Zeldin.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Trump administration’s bid to end an Environmental Protection Agency program may essentially block any company — even an oil firm — from accessing federal subsidies for capturing carbon or producing hydrogen fuel.

On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed that it would stop collecting and publishing greenhouse gas emissions data from thousands of refineries, power plants, and factories across the country.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue